About the Founder

Mia Lipman, Principal Editor, began wrangling copy for a living in 1999, when she graduated from Wesleyan University with a BA in English and a keen eye for slaying errors. Since then, she has edited (approximately) gazillions of books, magazines, websites, short stories, white papers, marketing materials, and résumés.

Mia has held staff jobs at University of California Press, Avalon Travel Publishing, San Francisco magazine, Amazon Publishing, ParentMap, and Yesler/Projectline, as well as in-house contractor gigs at Apple and Yahoo. She began freelancing in 2000, and in 2013 she relaunched her business as Dots & Dashes. Her client roster includes media, nonprofit, and technology companies (see here for details), and she reviews fiction and nonfiction for Kirkus Reviews and Omnivoracious, among other outlets. Mia is a member of the Northwest Independent Editors Guildand the National Book Critics Circle.

A seasoned interviewer and public speaker, Mia has been lucky enough to chat on the record with the likes of Oliver Sacks, Jeanette Winterson, and Barbara Kingsolver (see here for clips), and she has been a panelist and moderator at AWP and the Bay Area Editors’ Forum. She also travels far and often—her former hometowns include Paris, Dublin, San Francisco, and Northampton, Mass., and she has spent time in South America, Asia, and the Middle East. These days she lives in Seattle, where she gives the occasional guest lecture at University of Washington and University of Puget Sound.

In 2006, Mia cofounded Canteen magazine, a literary journal that expanded into an active nonprofit: Canteen Arts later added a youth journal, canTeens, and ran a creative writing program for middle schoolers in Harlem. She stepped down from Canteen Arts in 2013 to launch Lit Fix, a quarterly reading and music series. All proceeds from Lit Fix events are donated to local nonprofits that promote literacy.

To get in touch with Mia about a potential project, please visit the Contact page.

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